Who Will Fact-Check The Fact-Checkers?

"Barack Obama was president when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005".

The author, Arturo Garcia (@aboynamedart), does present examples that may be bots, humorists or knuckleheads thumping Obama for a slack response to Katrina. However, author Arturo led with this Tweet from @JacobAWohl:

When floods hit Louisiana, Obama was too busy worrying about the tough sand traps on the golf-course to go assess the damage

Ooops! No mention of Katrina there! And since Obama did in fact take political heat for remaining on vacation during the Louisiana Flood of 2016 that left 13 dead and damaged 60,000 homes, one might even argue that the lead tweet cited by Snopes is 100% accurate. Here is CNN from over a year ago (and yes, it's been a long year with a lot to forget):

Obama tours Louisiana amid criticism that he's late

Updated Aug 23, 2016

Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama toured flood-ravaged Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Tuesday, surveying wreckage that has also become a political football.

"We are heartbroken by the loss of life," Obama said after seeing firsthand the damage in the state's capital that has caused more than 106,000 residents and households to register for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. More than 60,000 homes were damaged, officials said, and 13 people were killed.

...

The flooding has created political headache for the White House as critics blasted Obama for being too slow to visit the state. He spent the previous week vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, while Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, visited the state and handed out supplies.

"Tuesday's too late," Trump told Fox News this weekend. "Hop into the plane and go down and go to Louisiana and see what's going on, because it's a mess.

Will Snopes amend their "fact-check"? Maybe! After all, it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. I don't know Art but I know what I like, and that includes reliable fact-checking. Let the scuffling begin.

STEALTH: Snopes has revised the offending paragraphs, which now read (my emphasis in both paragraphs):

As damage from Hurricane Harvey continued to grow in Texas in late August 2017, some Twitter users sought to defend President Donald Trump’s response to the disaster by criticizing the actions of his predecessor, Barack Obama during similarly pervasive flooding in Louisiana in 2016:

The lead Tweet from Jacob A Wohl is presented as before, now followed by this:

Other users took that argument even further, knocking Obama for not “doing enough” to help Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina. The argument that Obama did not do enough after Hurricane Katrina lashed New Orleans, however, ignores the fact that Obama was not president at the time. Katrina made landfall in August 2005, during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Wow! How did all the critics miss those underlined portions? Well, we didn't - down at the very bottom is a second update from Snopes, flagged in red:

Updated the story to clarify the nature of some of the online criticism toward former President Barack Obama.

"Clarify" it?. "Correct" is the word they are looking for, but whatever.

Lest you doubt, Mediaite ran a screenshot of the offending text that caught their eye. Good judgment by them, and silly of me to trust Snopes:

Left unanswered - why in the world would they have included the Jacob A. Wohl Tweet from the outset if they understood it referred to the 2016 floods?

PILING ON: Elsewhere the Google Cache kicks back this version of the original Snopes effort.

Given Session's visibility fighting the good fight for the 63 million Trump voters who voted to retsore the Rule of Law, would it be rude of me to ask if he recused himself from the entire job at the same time?

Posted by: Old Lurker | August 31, 2017 at 10:25 AM

OL, you keep this up and I swear Jeff Sessions is going to pay a personal visit to Lurker's Ledge and beat the ever'lovin' hell outta some damn body.

I look forward to welcoming you to the Veranda with me. You will have to bring a case of gin, though.

RG and I will be sitting in our comfy wicker chairs, sipping away on martinis and laughing as we watch Trump and SESSIONS run rings around the dems.

By the way, Trump has a meeting with the minority leaders either today or maybe next week. Supposedly this is about the tax reform/cuts, but I wonder if he has other informaion he wishes to share with them. HA!

(Still trying to figure out how to quit Gmail, and I'm finding FastMail to be excellent. It's a paid service based in Australia, subject to Australian privacy laws, and will not respond to anything but a lawful Australian court order before turning over any user's info to anyone.)

Mr. Snopes found a new, improved wifey ("firmly rolled and fully packed") and the original one hid money in Vegas real estate. Post divorce, they are duking it out in court. The obese tabby is probably running the place for Facebook.
May the best crook win!

Ultimately, for the moment at least, our lives are open books. Apart from my email, what my cell phone and credit card companies know about me tells the intimate journey of my everyday life. The government has ready access to all of this information and my Gmail – and all of yours as well. That pales in comparison to what you’ve shared with Facebook – I stopped using it socially in 2013. Our cultural norms of privacy simply haven’t kept up with the Internet and smartphones.

There needs to be fundamental changes to the way privacy and security is built-into email platforms, devices and applications. I’m talking to you Google, Microsoft, Apple – Facebook!

As technologists, we’ve not yet risen to the challenge of digital privacy and we’ve allowed our employers and our political leaders to auction it off to the highest bidder. There’s so much work for us to do — and to do well — for the average person to regain privacy.

Then noticed it was covered by an artist I greatly admire with a well des(e)rved, sadly posthumous, following. I listened and it struck me as a near perfect interpretation of Joni's song.
Woodstock by Eva
Performed live in a small venue apparently attended by friends and fans.
Posted by: boris | August 30, 2017 at 10:30 PM

boris - Eva Cassidy's story is heartbreaking . . . a truly gifted singer and guitarist, who passed away far too soon. A career that was just beginning to take off when she was felled by cancer.

I learned about her magical voice in 2002, and asked a co-worker who came from the DC area if he had ever heard of her. Turned out that he had been a late-night DJ for a DC-area radio station that played a jazz/blues/soul music mix, and he had been one of the first local DJ's to play her music on the radio and to promote her to his audience.

He said that she was one of the greatest singers he had ever heard, and one of the nicest people he'd ever met. You could see he was still moved by her passing some six years later.

Knowing her back story makes her music all the more impactful, and touching.

Here she is with one of her best, "What a Wonderful World", the song she sang at the end of her last performance, when she was consumed by her cancer, and could barely perform:

Sounds ominous, but:
1) interview already happened and no leaks meaning nothing negative about Trump (or it wouls have leaked)
2) the only details in the article are the exact same as from a few months ago

Since Antifa and racist violence charges backfired on the Dems, they r back to Russia nothing burgers

Now might of someone not properly filed a form or did questionable financial transactions outside of the campaign? Sure. It sounds like the Dems may have done the same.

And what about alleged pressure on Manefort and/or Flynn to "turn"? Turn what? The FBI has found nothing on Russia and Trump in the past year yet people think it was hidden so well only a couple of guys briefly on Trumps campaign or a few weeks in the admin have all the juicy details?

Hopefully the deep state will continue to push fake stories at least another year while the Dems continue with their no ideas and Antifa violence platform.

I know President Trump doesn't have most of his people confirmed yet. I know it's hard to change cultures and drain swamps. I know it's hard to fire Federal employees.

But it certainly seems like we're at (or, really, far past) the point where the toxic Obama holdovers and Deep State bureaucrats are doing so much harm that they really need to be removed en masse, by whatever means necessary.

The Snopes article correctly distinguishes between the 2016 flood and Katrina. Your article is misleading in the extreme. I fixed it for you by including the sentence before and after the one you are complaining about:

"some Twitter users sought to defend President Donald Trump’s response to the disaster by criticizing the actions of his predecessor, Barack Obama during similarly pervasive flooding in Louisiana in 2016: 'When floods hit Louisiana, Obama was too busy worrying about the tough sand traps on the golf-course to go assess the damage' Other users took that argument even further, knocking Obama for not “doing enough” to help Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina. "

[Those are revisions inserted by Snopes and mysteriously cited in their second UPDATE as an attempt to "clarify" their original story. I guess they don't do corrections. More in an update to my post (incl. a screenshot from Mediaite), a comment at 1:34 by zapt, and my comment at 2:08. - TM]

While it is unclear how many of the recent spate of anti-Obama tweets were manufactured or made in jest, an August 2013 survey conducted by the Democrat-oriented Public Policy Polling showed that 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans believed that Obama was to blame for the oft-critized federal response to Katrina. Another 44 percent were reportedly unsure whether Obama or George W. Bush was at fault, while 28 percent blamed Bush.

PT says "The Snopes article correctly distinguishes between the 2016 flood and Katrina."

It does now, but not before it was updated.

They added the phrase "during similarly pervasive flooding in Louisiana in 2016", and the sentence "Other users took that argument even further, knocking Obama for not “doing enough” to help Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina."

I did a quick scan of the last couple of days' posts and I didn't see this posted, but please forgive me if someone beat me to the punch. This is an excellent article from sundance at The Conservative Treehouse about China's economic weaknesses and how the Trump administration plans to exploit them to further the "America First" economic policy.

I am astonished at how much I am coming to depend on (in particular) the economic analyses of things at the Treehouse. The information they provide and the viewpoints they profess are different than anything else I can find, and yet, we see their predictions playing out exactly as they claim, every time. It has other interesting viewpoints, also, but it is economics and commerce that keep me coming back for more.

You keep that bottle since it only took me to peek at the names and had to spit.

Now how the hell do those 2 relics and founding fathers of the Uniparty join up to write that dribble? I can see them using old Red phones they stole from their time in the WH and using them once they woke up from falling asleep reading the New York Times and discussed how to salvage the power of the middle.

I do have faith. I had faith he could win the primary, and faith he could beat Hillary. Not many did, but I did and I was right!

So, I continue to have faith and patience.

I see that Fox is now pushing their polls which say all sorts of bad things about the President, like he's tearing the country apart.

It is BS. I do not know one Trump supporter who believes that. The weasel Wallace was on and the blonde of the hour was talking to him about the President's empathy again.

Well, George Bush was a famous crier, like it did him any good when Katrina got botched up by the democrats running Louisiana and New Orleans.

Another question on their stupid poll was whether Trump hated white supremacists or the media more. Now tell me that the Charlottesville thing wasn't planned. I believe it was,, starting with the organizer being a dem plant.

All designed to cast him as something he is not. Unfortunately for their plan, we are seeing hours and hours of Texans pulling each other out of flooded homes regardless of the colors of their skin, which is how I think most decent people behave.

People also forget that the President has a lot of experience in story lines and plot arcs, courtesy of his television show and his involvement with WWE and Miss Universe.

I figure we are just past the "Washington tries to stop Trump" act and are moving onto "The Donald strikes back" portion.

I will have beautiful statues on the Faith and Patience Portico, including one of Melania in heels. And lots of gold trim!

I really appreciate the economics/trade/commerce stuff I find on Treehouse. I don't have access to much information on those subjects (wouldn't even know where to look) but there is a reason we have such a top notch economics team.

President Trump has been railing about NAFTA for years, and he went nuts over the Iran deal. He has been paying attention for a long time.

I fervently hope the GOPe just surrenders and either goes along with him or retires. I think Flake might retire since Kelli Ward is WAY ahead of him.

Anyway, I check every day to see if there are new articles about trade and foreign policy intertwined. I think Sundance must know someone in the administration, as accurate as he is.

The Snopes article correctly distinguishes between the 2016 flood and Katrina. Your article is misleading in the extreme. I fixed it for you by including the sentence before and after the one you are complaining about...

From a second Snopes UPDATE discreetly tucked away at the bottom:

Updated the story to clarify the nature of some of the online criticism toward former President Barack Obama.

That somnambulant monkey doesn't want any part of me, even with a sore back. I will retract all criticism if he ever does something that illustrates he's up to the challenges of the job, so he controls his status.

On the first day, I attended a plenary session at which, one after another, several members of the Russian Academy of Sciences stood up and presented scientific results demonstrating that the "science" -- if one can call it that -- is not "settled"; that every major aspect of the climate Communist Party Line is in doubt; that the doubt is sufficient to require that Russian cities should not gallop towards the insane policies that most scientifically-illiterate Western countries had been feeble-minded enough to espouse; and that, in any event, the cost of the Party Line was so excessive as to be unaffordable.

The biggest cheer of the day went to the formidable Academician Nigmatulin, a redoubtable 75-year-old veteran of the Communist regime, who, in a thunderous sergeant-major's parade-ground yell, brought the audience to its feet with his peroration to the effect that "The problem for Russia is not global warming. It is profiteering priests of the new religion, bloated bureaucrats and dithering democrats."

Now tell me that the Charlottesville thing wasn't planned. I believe it was,, starting with the organizer being a dem plant.

The MFM has shown an astounding lack of curiosity about him compared to, say, Joe the Plumber. Amazing that the organizer of an event that LITERALLY TORE THE NATION APART produced so little interest. Kind of like Hodgkinson.

I am quite certain that this was Courtney Lawton’s reference. Not content to scream stupid political smears, she called a Nebraska sophomore a “basic bitch” and associated her with fellatio. This was sexual harassment at a minimum, likely with a racist element (“hot white girl”) as well.

One more thing: the kind of vileness celebrated by Plies and indulged in by Lawton has been legitimized by Barack Obama and other liberals. Obama invited Plies to the White House along with other rappers, but Plies turned the president down.

As repellent as these people are, the story has a happy ending. Katie Mullen was back in business with her Turning Point USA table yesterday. She said that she signed up 56 students on Friday and more than 60 yesterday. The leftists’ attempt to silence her has failed.

UPDATE: The blonde-haired professor seen holding a “watch list” sign in the video is Amanda Gailey. She is an anti-gun activist best known for posting a rant that includes “f*** [our] society…,” “f*** the laws…,” “f*** police officers…” and “f*** the NRA.” Like Plies, Gailey’s work met with approval from Barack Obama. He invited her to meet with him personally when he traveled to Omaha.

Maybe Baker and Young could explain to these seemingly misguided women the finer points of diplomacy and coming together as one. Maybe they could then explain them to our former prez.

So true. I get my information on the guy from a couple of investigative types I follow on Twitter, who have assembled quite a bit of information on the guy, who seems to have been an Obama supporter and with the Occupy movement and who was associated as a contributor to CNN.

This bit got me - "To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."

Cheryl Mills - Clinton’s former State Department chief of staff and her attorney
Heather Samuelson - Clinton aide and lawyer, she decided which emails were government business and which should be destroyed.
John Bentel - ran the State Department's information resources management office when Clinton served as secretary
Bryan Pagliano ****- Clinton's personal IT guy who she placed in the State Dept. IT section.
Paul Combetta ***- from Platte River Networks. He was the guy who went on Reddit & asked strangers how to delete emails that were archived & how to remove email addresses from archived material.

" Mills and Samuelson were given immunity in exchange for handing over their laptop computers to the FBI, with an agreement that they would not be prosecuted for any information obtained from those laptops..." **

"Bentel, in late 2010, told two State Department employees not to discuss Clinton’s email system after they raised questions with him about why she was using a private account. The department’s inspector general found that the employees “discussed their concerns about Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email account” with Bentel in late 2010, five years before the existence of the server became known publicly. "... **

The press has signaled the narrative, Josh Gerstein of Politicao points out that Comey's July 5, 2016 statement was critical of Clinton, and damaged her campaign. Who knew, Comey was planning to sink Clinton all along.

Henry and CBoldt:
That info on Comey is dynamite and may be why Presidnt Trump fired him.
Of course he overstepped his bounds by usurping Lynch 's role after she compromised herself by meeting with Bill.
Hillary never blames her curb dive for her loss.
To me it was the event that triggered the beginning of the end for her.
It was my first day of hope that yes she could be beaten.
I would be happy to make and serve snacks at the verandah

But I also reserve the right to spot Porch on the Ledge during her dinner and break times as a substitute bartender.
Clarice:
Your article that you cited is disturbing.We must receive justice.

Re: the Louisiana floods, the important thing is that Obama didn't wear stiletto heels when he finally showed up.

Re: DACA, Washington Times says that Trump "faces several options, including refusing new applications but allowing the nearly 800,000 current enrollees to continue to renew their amnesty; halting the program in its tracks, which would prevent new applications or renewals, putting a two-year sunset on the program; or revoking it altogether, throwing those now protected back into a legal limbo."

I'm for choice a. (denying new kids of illegals but letting the ones who are here stay); there actually are high school valedictorians and whatnot among that group, and what their parents did in the past is obviously no fault of their own. For me, refusing new applications is stringent enough, and fair. I know others may differ.

Meanwhile, some people got their last names from people who owned slaves; those people should be torn down immediately.

Here's my prediction so pay attention, people. The line regarding the assertion the Clinton subject isn't interesting enough to the public is a Trump Administration tell.

It means, Lurker's Ledge notwithstanding, they are on the J.O.B.

The investigation is ongoing.

Comey (remember him? tain't hearing much about him these days, are ya?) has probably flipped.

So calm the hell down, take a sip every now and again out on the Portico, and let us together watch this thing play out. We have *very* capable administrators in place. There is a methodical python-like squeeze being undertaken. To me, it appears to be geared for the 2018 elections.

The stuff that necessarily involves Congress and the workings of the administrative state in DC is murkier. But . . . the President as Chief Executive operating internationally? Sundance outlined a very nice summary the other day that had to please all aficionados of Marples' Faith and Patience Portico. The comment on that squeeze is next up.

The extent of immunity agreements in the Clinton e-mail investigation is astounding.

Did Comey make his decision to let Hillary off the hook before or after these immunity agreements were offered to all of her underlings involved with her illegal server? If he did it before then that almost sounds like obstruction of justice on his part.